I've said before I think for a lot of HDD installable software we'll have to create some kind of 'reference' image too
my point of view is that we should support the formats which are HDs+installed games (WHD, HDF, XDF, etc) but not in lists. how could you determine if he installation is "good"? or how is it accurate to the original media?
OTOH, it would be very good to have some scripting system [1] which make install automatized, so that if you want to start from scratch you don't need to have a listed HD image for each game but just launch "emulation + empty HD + script" and ffw with Insert until the end of installation
this would make emulation both very accurate (e.g. no need of preinstalled cracks in the case of protected disks) and easy to use, i.e. a win-win situation
the problem might be how to actually expose some core inputs/handlers without things being too much driver-specific...
[1] and these scripts should be probably external from the lists themselves, so that we can host packs of them on the MESS website, and update them whenever we need to modify any installation process...
